 Welcome. This is a fantastic turnout. David was afraid no one would show up. David Ives is probably best known for his evenings of one-act comedies called All in the Timing and Time Flies. All in the Timing won the Outer Critics Circle Playwriting Award. David also travels with his own laugh track. All in the Timing won the Outer Critics Circle Parenting Award and ran for two years off Broadway in the 1995-96 season. Was the most performed play in the country after Shakespeare productions. His full-length plays include Venus and Fur, which recently enjoyed a vast critical in audience success off Broadway. New Jerusalem, the interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, which won the prestigious Hull Warner Award. Is he dead? Adapted from Mark Twain. Irving Berlin's White Christmas, Polish Joke and Ancient History. He's translated for those classic farce, a flea in her ear. Pierre Cornet's 1643 comedy, The Liar, and an armist hit this fast spring at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C. also winning the Charles MacArthur Best Play Award at the Helen Hayes Awards. And Molière's Miss and Throat undertitled the School for Lies. Another large hit which premiered at Classic Stage Company in New York this spring. David Ives is also the author of three young adult novels, Monsieur Ike, Scribb and Voss. And he has adapted 30 American musicals for New York City's Beloved Encore Series. A graduate of Yale School of Drama and a former Guggenheim fellow in playwriting he lives in New York City. I first met David when I was a Lark Playwrights workshop fellow back in 2007. His critiques were always kind and lightning and spot on. I remember at one point I brought in the latest section from a play I'd been working on and we all heard it read aloud. After the reading was finished he asked me, so how far into the play are you? I told him that that part took us up to page 70. He asked me what the play was about. I told him I had no idea. And his reply was simple and concise. Uh-huh, was all he said. Some more feedback from others was given but I could tell David wasn't finished. He finally blurred it out. But where is the dramatic arc? Where is this going? Again, I answered I had no idea. David paused a moment and then dryly concluded I would look at that. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So I was always kind? You were. I did look at that and I concluded that the play was going nowhere. So I started a new play the next day. But since the time that Gary asked me to host this conversation I've been pouring over David's play. Some I was familiar with, some I was not. And it occurred to me as I was getting what seemed to be a master class in crafting comedy that David Ives knows exactly where he's going. It was such a fun journey to go along with him these last few weeks. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Ives. So you were saying you actually wanted to talk about drama today. Yes, we're not talking about comedy. Okay, good. It's to be perverse. I think we should just get to the crux. Where's the dramatic arc? Where is this going? Let's get to the crux. Just tell us the key to crafting good comedy so we can all go back to the hotel to start writing. Next question. So let's talk about all the timing. Let's start at the beginning. And you just mentioned this in the car in the way here. I love the use of the bell. Oh yes, the use of the bell. Where did that come from? Because you was in other places as well. Where did that come from? The bell actually gets lapsed. The bell is a character. The bell is a character. You can just write that first but not all of us allowed to. Okay. What? Sure, take that woman. The only woman here who does not know about the bell. Please. Please, Matt. What are you doing in this hall? Money back. The bell and all of the timing. All of the timing is a series of six short plays. Several of which employed a bell in various ways. The most famous one, I suppose, is a play called Sure Thing in which two people, it's two people sitting at a table very like this, a guy and a girl on a lonely night out, they don't know each other. He strikes up a conversation with the woman and every time one of them says something which is completely wrong in terms of ever getting together, a bell rings and they start all over. And so that is sort of the use of the bell. Where that came from was, I actually wrote the idea for that play down many years before. In a notebook I wrote, I wrote down just this. A play which is a conversation that shows all of the possible conversations two people can have. And so I sat on that for the longest time and then one night I just thought, oh, I sort of, I think I know how to do that. And so I sat down and I started writing but I didn't know, I knew that the conversation had to stop and start but I didn't know how to stop and start it. So I, just for the, just to sort of mark time for myself, I thought, oh, well I'll put in a bell and then I'll figure this out later on and then I started laughing every time the bell rang. And so I just kept the bell. And so I wrote a bunch of bell plays but unfortunately for me or for the bell I once ran into Stephen Sondheim whom I know somewhat and he turned to the person he was with and he said, this is David Ives. He writes the plays with the bells. That was the end of the bell. He didn't know, he didn't know he changed my career. As I have not changed his. But he changed my life and so I threw the bell out the window that very day where it's lying nine stories below my apartment this very minute. And so that's the story behind the bell came to be. It was sheer chance. It was improvisational just for the moment which is how a lot of those little plays come in. Had you ever considered using a gong after that possibly? Well, I used a fight bell in one way but that was as far as I was willing to go. You have so much fun with language to the point where you even created one of your own in that Hilarious One Act, the universal language. But even more than language you seem to have a fascination with the way we communicate or fail to do so as is so often the case. I don't understand. And I'll just be the straight man. I'll set him up. We rehearsed that in the car. Exactly. So let's talk about that. I know you're a great observer of people. When did you first realize that this fascination with language was going to net you millions of dollars? Who? Actually, I have to be perfectly honest. I think that a lot of those early plays which the woman in row ten does not know about a lot of those early plays are concerned with language in one way or another, like the universal language, right? I wanted to create a play that was I wanted to write a play that was in gibberish to see how much fun I could have and how much an audience could understand what people were saying even though they were speaking gibberish. And so for a time I was, yes, fascinated by that but I have to say that I don't think I'm writing those plays anymore. I think language went the way of the bell and Stephen Sondheim said, this is David Ives who writes the plays in the English language. So I swore I think English language had decided to pursue other means instead. But I don't quite, yes, I was concerned as I think actually a lot of young playwrights are. It's like when you look at early pinter, he's very concerned with that and he kind of moves away from that later on. He actually gets involved with human beings. And so I got more interested in human beings at some point than I was in language. And so I don't think I write those plays anymore but tonight that all could change. Let's hope so. Based on this conversation. Exactly. This is just a personal question. Are you not a Philip Glass fan or was your play Philip Glass buys a loaf of bread in homage? I wrote a play for the lady in row 15. I wrote a play called Philip Glass buys a loaf of bread many years ago which was one of the plays in all of them. The timing, it's five minutes and 38 seconds long and it's four people in a bakery. One of them is Philip Glass and it turns into this a cappella Philip Glass opera with them repeating only the words that they have spoken in the play. And so it's this little enclosed madcap riff on what Philip Glass does. And I wrote it as a, certainly as a send up but you know you can't send somebody up without somehow acknowledging what they do. Otherwise it's just pastiche. And so also for those of you who may know the play there's a little dramatic story. There's a dramatic arc in the story. It's about time. And so in the five minutes and 38 seconds Philip Glass goes from meeting a woman that he was in love with to pondering the relationship they were in all in repetitive syllables and then sort of seeing the end of the relationship. And so I used it just for fun but I, again, like the universal language I wanted to write a play that was musical to the core without having to call it a composer. And so I well remember sitting in my little apartment tapping up the rhythms at one o'clock in the morning of this play and for what it would sound like. And I'm sure my neighbor thought I was insane because I was doing this. But one of the things that happened with that play this was in the years when I was having a lot of I would have a one act or two done at the Manhattan punchline every year and they had a little comedy festival which was invaluable if you wrote 10 minute or 12 minute or five minute and 38 second comedies. And so I remember writing the play and being petrified because I was taking it into the producer to look at it, to submit it for that year. And the Manhattan punchline was basically a Xerox machine and an artistic director going bankrupt. All that he owned was the mustache on his face. So it was a heater. He owned the mustache on his face. And so I was petrified and he was going to go, what the hell is this? And so I brought it in and I said, Steve, I've got a play I'd like to submit for the comedy festival this year. And he took it for me and he said, Philip classifies a loaf of bread. I'll do it. And he put it on his mask and I said, don't you want to look at it? He said, no, I don't need to look at it. But if he had opened it, he would have seen it speaking in verse, you know. And so always have a good title, I guess, is the moral of that story. Well, good. Which leads us into the next question that I have for you. Because one of my favorite, one act of yours is soap opera. And it's a play that actually is an episode of a soap opera called All the Days of the World of the Lies of All Our Children. In which a Maypole repairman brings a washing machine into a French restaurant for a quiet, romantic meal. Is that, it's realism. It's realism. Now this is probably your most pun lately play, I think. I can't, I can't. Okay, it is. And you use them to such great effect. So I'm guessing you're not one of the many that feel that puns are the lowest form of humor. No, but actually this play was based on the fact that I had a quite long relationship with a household appliance for some time. And so it's actually autobiographical. If there are any puns in it, they were completely unintended. I love puns. I have to say I'm cheap enough to employ them at any possible turn. Because I love to hear audiences grow. And people who look down on puns, I look down on them. It's reverse psychology. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about it play a little bit. Okay. Yes, it's about a Maytag slash in the play Maypole repairman who falls in love at an early age with the Maytag in his basement who tries to reenact this childhood memory, but he falls in love with... He becomes a Maypole repairman and falls in love with a washing machine who torments him, of course. Yes, and then there's someone inside the machine that actually is the voice of the machine. Yes, there's an actress inside the washing machine who is the goddess of the washing machine and torments him. Yes. And so the repairman shows up with the machine at a French restaurant in a conversation with the major D asking for a table and for two. And then he explains to the major D, basically, we see his relationship with Mabel, who was a woman and that didn't work out. He had been in love with an actual woman named Mabel. He always had a stain of jelly on her and her shirt, yes. And so she was stained and the Maypole the Maypole washing machine represents purity, a nuclear purity in its most advanced form whereas Mabel is impure. And so it's a flashback, you see. Very sudden, yes. Very sudden, and it goes in cycles. There's so many punter puns in there. There's one kind of a closing barrage of puns happens where he names every major detergent all cheer, tide, the tightest turn for all. But be a good cheer and it is so grown worthy. And at that time or at that point in the play we're almost finished. I just love that play so much and I just wanted to hear a little bit more from you. Sadly, I never got to see Venus infer, but you told me it was excellent and I believe you. I was only quoting other people. Exactly. Well I read the reviews and they said the same thing. What drew you to this novel from 1870 by Leopold von what is it? Zacher Masach. Pretty funny. It's an automatic play. It's an automatic play. Leopold von Zacher Masach. What led you to this for those of you who for the lady in row 15 She's moved back to 20 now. Crawling under the chairs as she goes. For those of you who've never heard of Venus infer Venus infer is probably the world's first and possibly well was for a time most famous SNM porn novel. It was written in 1870 by a fellow named Leopold von Zacher Masach who gave his name to masochism in the clinical directory. It's the story of a relationship of a Sadomasochistic relationship in Vienna in 1870 and sounds like comedy to me. No. What can't return into comedy. In any case Venus infer I turned into a play a couple of years ago and a two hander about an actress. It takes place in contemporary New York. It's an actress who is auditioning for a play for the part of Wanda the woman in Venus infer and she is auditioning for a play write who has not been able to find the woman to do this this sort of arrogant young play write and what happens in the course of this single act play is that as they act out scenes from the play they progressively start to reenact Venus infer the novel in which there is this back and forth of power and submission and and so where that came from was that actually I had another idea for a play which was some years ago I don't know if any of you know the said a masochistic porn novel called The Story of Oh which was quite famous for you know and still it's a really extraordinary French novel quite gruesome but very pure and I'd always been fascinated by that book because of its purity it's this woman who enters into a relationship and goes sort of it's almost as if she transcends the world through the submissive relationship and so I had this idea of how to turn that into a play because I thought it would be this beautiful sort of performance piece as it turned out luckily for me the rights are completely unavailable because everybody has wanted the rights for the last 50 years and so since it was on my mind I just thought oh I'll pick up Venus infer which was sort of the earlier famous SNM pornographic novel and as I read it I thought this is a great play because it is two people locked in a relationship where you never know who actually holds the power and since plays are you know almost every play in some way comedy tragedy any play is about shiftings of power between people and so this play seemed to me to crystallize a relationship and a love relationship and so I took I sort of took the play and the book and I adapted it I adapted it straightforwardly into a play and I gave it to Walter Bobby who is my longtime collaborator director and he we have an extraordinary friendship, relationship collaboration whereby we just speak our minds and he read it and he said I have to tell you I don't think this works and he said I can't tell you what to do with it I think there is something here but it's too literal and it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with today because it was set in 1870 and so I just took that and I sat on it for about six months and then I just started I just sat down with with the adaptation of the literal adaptation of the novel and I just started stripping away everything that was not drama and everything that was not confrontational everything that was not not an exchange of power or an ambiguous moment in the relationship and once I stripped that away I had these extraordinary moments of drama and I don't quite know how I came to it I thought what if two people have to act this and so I put them in an audition room and I locked two people into a room where a director who are in a natural position of power submission at every moment are enacting a play about power and submission and so that's kind of how that played again and it it just gripped me at a certain point the story of two people which are actually four people of course because they're not only playing themselves the actress and the director but they're playing the two people inside so it's a play within a play that they're doing in this audition room needless to say with tragic consequences when you talk about stripping I know there are a lot of people that not when you talk about stripping when you talk about stripping things away I know there are a lot of people that do adaptations in this room and are interested in talking about that and this isn't on my question sheet so we're going we're this is a risk okay what's your process yeah do you have do you storyboard do you have no cards how do you go about keeping track of things when you're discarding so much I seem to have turned into an adapter in the course of my life but I take solace in the fact that Shakespeare actually was an adapter since 35 of his works out of 37 were actually adaptations and so I when I lie awake at night I can take solace in Shakespeare but when I when I'm adapting something for example I'll give you an example I recently had a show in New York this past month called The School for Lies which was my adaptation of The Missing Throat by Moliere and I had just done a play in verse The Wire here in Washington at the Shakespeare Theatre I had done one play in verse and I wanted to do another play in verse and the head of the classic stage came to me and said is there any play you'd like to work on to translate or adapt and I said well I've never liked The Missing Throat very much why don't I work on that and I mean that quite seriously I know that this is heresy but I'm actually not a huge fan of Moliere and never have been because I'm never satisfied by his plots you always felt Moliere was a better I feel like Moliere speaks to me because Moliere was a greater human being in that his plays Moliere's play preceded Moliere by some 20 years or 25 years but Moliere to me was the end of the Baroque which is the end of Shakespeare which is to say plays of enormous humanity an enormous understanding and to me Moliere's play a very narrow understanding he's essentially setting up the world Korné was interested in understanding and appreciating and celebrating the world and that's why I'm a fan of Korné and why I had just done Korné's play The Liar at Shakespeare Theatre of Washington but I've always been fascinated by The Missing Throat as a great play that's never satisfied me because there's not enough plot to it it's this extraordinary relationship of basically a curmudgeon in France in 1666 and a society woman who is completely superficial a gossiping hostess and it's their love affair and how it falls apart so it's sort of a tragic comedy and that to me was a story that I wanted to tell and that's why I really wanted to go to The Missing Throat and so I had to think and once I'd said that and he said yes why don't you adapt The Missing Throat I had to think about how to go about this first of all I knew it had to be in verse because Molière is in verse and actually for me if you take Molière out of verse it becomes a sitcom because it is levitated by the wonderful verse of Molière I must say that his verse is quite pure it's like a scene almost but so I knew it had to be in verse and I knew what the central relationship was of this curmudgeon and this woman and so what I started doing was I started doing to the play all of the things that Molière would have done to the play had he lived another 350 years and been me and had my taste and wrote in English and had a production of a classic stage company and so what I did was I took I wrote on index cards actually well I took notes and notes and notes thinking about these characters and what I wanted from them because the French tradition is so alien to us that French classical comedy rarely works and so I thought this has to be a Shakespeare play it has to be it has to have that kind of size it has to have that kind of broadness and various experiences the misanthrope is quite narrow and it's concerns and so what I did was after I took notes for two months just sitting at the computer and sort of noodling and letting my subconscious go and then I took index cards and I wrote down all of the scenes that are in Molière and I laid them out on my dining room table and then I took other index cards and I wrote scenes that I thought were missing and these two totally unlikely people fall in love and what's funny about that and so I wrote on a card he meets Sally Madden who is the woman and so I started I really plotted that adaptation the way one writes a screenplay where I kept writing cards and moving them around my dining room table until I had a story because story to me is the hardest thing in the world to make people talk once they are in a dramatic situation but if I don't have a dramatic situation I'm lost but once I had curmudgeon meets society hostess and falls in love with her I had a scene that was potentially funny potentially moving potentially romantic and so all I had to do was plunge in and so I wrote a sort of literal prose adaptation and then I translated that into verse which kind of was another whole process but in adaptation I have to know where I'm going or I'm lost I'm not a writer even when I write my own plays that can noodle on no idea it's like I know Harold Pinter used to get drunk, go home write down a lot of dialogue and just start writing and I can't do that I don't have that I need people in a situation and one of the things I love about Shakespeare since I'm on this subject and one of the things that informed adapting Molière is that Shakespeare always begins in drama you're always in the middle of the situation I mean look at the top of a fellow look at the top of King Lear look at the top of Hamlet he starts with drama and then he catches you up and so I need that I need to know what is going on in the scene and then you can you're there you don't have to do any work really you just have to put people give them a name and let them continue in the scene that they're in remembering something back from the Lark days I think aren't you the one that was talking about we had a conversation one day about writing the last scene knowing where you're going or having a sense of how the play is going to end at a certain point early in the process yes I've never I don't think I've ever written any play where I didn't know exactly where it was going to go and even though the middle of the play can be a great fog and there are things to be filled in it's like when I was adapting the misanthrope there's a subplot about some letters that are being used to sue somebody and it wasn't until I was in the middle of the play that I realized who had written the letters and to who and how they fit into the plot and I remember standing up in my writing room and like turning around my writing was tiny but it's like I stood up and I just turned around and around because I had found this piece so little things like that but I knew where that play was going to end even when I wrote a my tendon plays for all of the timing in those other plays I really would start out knowing the destination you know you're going to Buffalo and you can go to Buffalo by way of Boston or you can go by way of San Francisco but knowing Buffalo is the important thing actually knowing Buffalo is to die in the preface to the play you tell of how your agent gave you the 17th century by Cornet to read and you describe your reaction to it you write I found myself astonished exhilarated, giddy for lying on the desk before me was one of the world's great comedies I felt as if some lost Shakespeare festival comedy on the order of 12th night or much ado had been found this particular Shakespeare comedy was unfortunately locked away in French the French have a way of doing things like that but I could remedy that the prospect of anguishing this play made me feel like Ronald Coleman distantly citing Shangri-La you told me that you had maybe more fun writing this play than any other play you've ever written why I didn't have more fun writing my play than any other play partly it was the joy of discovery that the Shakespeare theater Washington sent my agent the play I'd never heard of it none of you had heard of it or very few they sent it to me in French the lady back there knows but this the reading this play was like as if somebody had given me Midsummer Night's Dream but it was in French and so I was so delighted reading it that I knew I had to do it I had never worked in verse before it was in verse and I had to learn how to write in verse which was another joy because you see what happened was that learning how to write Ionic Pantameter and in fact Ionic Pantameter couplets what I would do is the play just took me over and every day I would walk down the street and translate anything I saw into Ionic Pantameter and I would translate the times into headlines in the times anywhere I was going and so this play just took me over and I was constantly screaming in the street things that I was realizing and every morning I would begin by reading out loud about 20 minutes of Shakespeare to myself reading some of the sonics or something from one of the comedies to see how Shakespeare manipulated Ionic Pantameter into speakable verse because I knew that it couldn't be Shakespearean in the sense of that kind of long baroque line we tend to work more you know our speech is in shorter lines in fact one of the interesting things I found out about speaking of crafting comedy is I realized that Ionic Pantameter which is ten syllables long you know lines of ten syllables long is actually too long for comedy and so I came up with a little diddy which is since Wigg works best in short quick pokes Ionic Pantameters not made for jokes because actually what I found is that punchlines in our era tend to be actually eight syllables or shorter and so that's why they're called punchlines and so I had to find a way to fit punchlines into a ten syllable line which was another part of crafting comedy but the thing about the lyre let me tell you what the lyre is about and you'll see why it was so exhilarating to work on the lyre is a play from 1643 a comedy about a young man who comes to Paris who is a pathological lyre he will lie about anything you ask him the time of day and he will find a way to lie about it and so the play is constructed simply out of a plot made of misunderstandings caused by his lies but his lies are a page long and they're in this beautiful rippling silver reverse and so it was an opportunity to look high on the poetry on the lyricism because really obviously what the play is about is about the artist because the artist gets through the world by making things up and so once I knew that once I knew that it was truly about the gift of imagination and the power of imagination to make this absolutely amoral young man get through everything that goes wrong without any problems it's like it's like being levitated with a plot like that and so that's why every day was a joy and so I was never happier in all the months that I was working on and that's why it was fun because I was learning a new language which is verse I was in a great play I was inside a great plot and I had wonderful people to spend my days with which were these French people from 1643 one of the things that's so wonderful about this play is it's interesting we in Stephen Schwartz's session this morning we were talking about the license you take in an adaptation and once you have the rights it's yours and you should be able to do what you want with it and so I didn't know what to expect when I David sent me a digital copy of the play so I got to read it on my computer this was the opening of this 17th century play ladies and gentlemen all cell phones off all cellophane secure finish your texting now not during my scene I'm in some theater but like where's the screen no eating please you think you're incognito yes you, the lady with the bean burrito put it away I have a crucial message this guy looks worried what does this passage anyway I knew that I was in for such a treat when I read that and because I honestly with all of the stuff that's been going on here I thought oh and I'm going to have to carve out some time to read a 17th century French parse it's a wonderful play it's just so much fun and you have such a good time with the language I'm glad we got to talk about that a bit anything else you want to talk about let's go so you call the liar a translactation please explain well I don't, you see one of the things that I've discovered about adaptation and I'm speaking truly of adapting plays and adapting plays by playwrights were dead I think we owe nothing to the play that we are adapting except to make it dramatic, funny speakable and producible I think that one has to take any steps in order to do that and I think this is what I came to about translation which is that I realized something that I had never realized in all my decades of laboring which is that in a funny way language is the least important part of the play because I mean look at somebody like O'Neill O'Neill's dialogue is often hewn from lumber you know it is often the most ungainly dialogue in the world but what magnificent plays he makes out of them because of what is happening between the characters because of the situations that they're in the relationships that are that are being enacted in front of us and so what I realized in translating and adapting is that you have to translate the play which is not the language the play is the network of relationships comic, tragic whatever you like that's going on between people and what you have to find is a language that does everything to support what is going on underneath the play in the same way that when I was adapting The Liar I realized this is a play about lyricism and imagination so everybody's language had to be had to rise a little it had to be a little you know it had to ripple more than regular speech but every scene had to hold its own dramatically and so I changed scenes in The Missing Throat I certainly added scenes to what Mollier had and I changed the plot a bit that's because you have to look at what the playwright had on his or her chest when they were writing it and what is on your chest when you're working on it because if there's not something on your chest when you're adapting a play or translating a play it's not going to work I can tell you that because just as when you're writing your own play you are writing it both because of the people who are on the page in front of you and because of something that you've got to get rid of or get off your chest and so Cornet was saying something that I realized I had on my chest which is the power of imagination to conquer all obstacles in the best of circumstances and so when I say translation that's what I mean is that you have to go underneath the play and see what was intended what is the drama here translate the drama and the language will take care of itself and so it is really a process of analysis and that's why I say I had to sit at my computer and take two months of notes and see how these characters worked what they were just as if I were creating a play of my own so that I understood when I sat down to finally write them in English and in verse what their speech was and how they talked and where they came from and how they were related to each other and how my language would enforce that absolutely that was a good answer let's talk about New Jerusalem, Shelley I read in an interview that you said and I quote I read that Einstein in his old age was asked if he believed in God and he said I believe in Spinoza's God so I picked up this book called The Courtier and the Heretic and I thought my God this is an amazing story how did it receive from there New Jerusalem is a play that was on about three years ago in New York it's a drama and fundamentally it concerns itself with the day in 1656 when Brooks Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community and from Amsterdam when he was banished from Amsterdam and I'll tell you why it seemed dramatic to me and if I keep harping on the word drama you may notice that I said that to Jim where's the dramatic arc I work on a play when it feels like everybody in a play is connected to the central drama and when I read about Spinoza when I read this book about Spinoza it just seemed to me instantly dramatic and here's why Spinoza was a 24 year old merchant in Amsterdam which was the freest city in the world in 1656 ever had ever been you could practice your faith you could be Jewish but a tragic hook a Faustian bargain had been made by the Jewish community in 1656 they were mostly from Portugal Spain and the city of Amsterdam only allowed them to practice their religion freely if the Jewish community policed its own people for heretics and so in 1656 word got out in the Jewish community which was very tight that Brooks Spinoza this young man who was a merchant and sort of favorite son of the community that everybody thought he was going to be the next chief rabbi of Amsterdam he was so religious word got out that he was passing around unorthodox opinions and the city of Amsterdam went to the Jewish community and said you have to stop him in any way you can or we will stop him if that's not dramatic I don't know what is also because Spinoza's mentor was the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who expected that his student would would certainly never be passing around unorthodox opinions and what I read in this book was that on this one day in 1656 Spinoza was summoned to his synagogue and he was questioned by his community about his beliefs and nobody there is no record of what was said inside that room but what we do know a couple of facts one of which is that his mentor the rabbi was not there that day but was across town and when he heard what was happening in the synagogue he rushed across town and he cursed his own student he cursed Spinoza and at the end of the day Spinoza was ejected from the Jewish community which meant that no one could have any contact with him no business man, nothing no one could come within five feet of him in fact it was the harshest excommunication in the history of the people of Amsterdam that remained so to this day and that piece of paper still exists which is a curse on Spinoza and the city of Amsterdam banished him from Amsterdam and so here you have a character whose entire life changed in one day a young man of 24 who was cut off from everything that he knew and whose community had to cut him off and whose city had to cut him off and he changed western civilization because he is of course one of the great philosophers in the history of the west and so I read this book and I thought what in the world was the scene like in that synagogue that day it just felt instantly dramatic and so I started constructing who had to be in the room that day and so it had to be Spinoza it had to be his teacher, the rabbi it had to be his sister from his family, it had to be his friend and so once I had this little nucleus of people who had to be in the synagogue making them speak to each other was actually an extraordinary experience because they are forced to speak because everybody nothing that anything that anybody does in that room affects everybody else in the room and that to me is drama that to me is when everybody is complicit in an action whether it's comedy or tragedy or melodrama a musical you name it everybody has to be connected to the action and so that was how that play came about and that's really what I mean by drama is that you are in a situation where people are forced to reveal themselves and that can be comedy or it can be drama I like to say that comedy is about people scrambling and tragedy is about people getting scrambled but in either case the story has to push them to reveal themselves to interact and so that was how that came about I did write the question down that I don't think we want to get into but it doesn't believe in determinism do you? that could be a very long conversation I can actually give the answer to that that Isaac Bachevus Singer did Isaac Bachevus Singer was once asked Mr. Singer do you believe in free will and he said do I have any choice? good answer so you write in a dark room correct? actually I have this little writing room in our apartment and I actually put black wall board over the window to make sure that it was dark enough because that's just how I've learned how to write when I was young and I was writing and when I was in college I would write in the middle of the night so I just got used to that but it's not a prescription for anybody I don't recommend putting wall board on your windows you write usually from after breakfast until around 2 correct? I have a schedule I write every day except days like today I write every day and yes I write from morning to the middle of the afternoon and then I take a walk and then if I have work in the evening I do that but that's really the fundamental writing time and what happens with the rest of the day do you go to the museum the opera opera ballet I take a walk in the city and I keep my ears open and don't use a cell phone an iPod and just listen to what people are saying in a funny way I don't take my main inspiration from the theater for what I do I'm inspired by music I'm inspired by poetry and I'm inspired by painting yes I wander over to the museum but in a funny way going to the theater now I'm so aware of theater tricks that I watching plays is very hard because I'm sort of watching how things are positioning so I find other ways to be inspired it occurs to me that some of you may have to go to other events at 3 is that correct anybody going to show up hands great let's take a little break and we'll come back for questions and then questions we'll do lots of questions we'll be back in 10 minutes